Festival gives fans the big V

By Kylie Northover, Reko Rennie

14 February 2007 — 1:50am

Melbourne music fans will have the chance to see Richard Branson's V Festival - but at twice the price of their northern neighbours.

The Best of V Festival, announced this morning, will feature the same line-up as the Sydney and Gold Coast dates, but will be split over two nights at the Myer Music Bowl - and at more than twice the cost.

Tickets for the Sydney and Gold Coast festival dates cost $124.40. Melbourne fans will have to outlay $110 per night to catch the same line-up.

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The festival's local promoter Michael Coppel told theage.com.au that the decision was due to the venue seating restriction in the Myer Music Bowl.

"Basically there's two reasons why," he said. "We're not playing a festival so we don't get the economies of scale to be able to do a 35,000-40,000 capacity show on one day.

"And we're playing essentially a limited capacity venue twice, with sort of duplicated costs and a substantially lower number of ticket sales, which basically account for a higher price."

When it was announced in September last year that Mr Coppel would stage an Australian version of the successful British event, music fans were shocked when Melbourne was left off the tour list.

In defending the decision, Mr Coppel declared in December that Melbourne was a "festival graveyard". He said he stands by his statement but believes the festival market is experiencing a resurgence.

"It's not so much a festival graveyard (now) Melbourne has proved it is a more difficult festival market traditionally than other cities have," he said.

"I stand by the statement - if you look at The Big Day Out results ... they've been the most established festival going around at the moment, and they've only ever sold out in one year and that was this current year.

"So I think no matter what Vivian Lees (Big Day Out promoter) may say, the reality is that they've always attracted bigger attendances on the Gold Coast and Auckland than they have in Melbourne," he said.

"Now I think what's happened is there's been a switch in Australian audiences' preferences in seeing festivals ... but certainly I think the results over the last six months indicate that the whole festival market is in a boom situation and everything seems to be selling extremely strongly," Mr Coppel said.

British legends the Pet Shop Boys, Groove Armada, Gnarls Barkley and New York rockers The Rapture will perform at the Bowl on April 3, while the Pixies, Jarvis Cocker, Phoenix, and special guests will perform on April 4.